1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally data processing and more specifically to a method and system for instantiating a disk image of a software product from a different network environment to a virtualized environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Corporations are motivated by several reasons to transition their physical data centers to a virtualized infrastructure. Physical data centers typically suffer from a problem of server sprawl where a large number of physical servers are used to host applications, with many servers being under-utilized. Migrating these applications to a virtualized infrastructure allows for server consolidation and potentially significant cost reduction.
Migrating production applications from physical datacenters to a virtualized environment is becoming essential to reduce operational costs. In order to avoid direct access to production systems, migration from disk snapshots is preferable. Model-based migration approaches are not suitable for this purpose due to a need to perform configuration discovery on production systems. More recent approaches rely upon an isolated network for instantiating snapshots. These approaches require special setup and are limited to handling network configurations only.
Thus, while the reasons for transitioning to a virtualized infrastructure may be compelling, migrating composite enterprise applications from a running production environment is not straightforward. These applications tend to have a number of complex interdependencies across the software stack that will need to be captured and fixed-up during migration. For instance, an application server maintains a set of IP address, port, database name, username, and password in order to connect to a database. Thus migration requires discovery of application configurations on production systems, making it an intrusive process.